To understand extinction, it helps to visit ghosts.
The shadowy remains of lost species are all around us — and you can see them in the world’s natural history museums, many of which display skeletons, bones, taxidermy specimens, digital recreations, or other embodiments of our loss, along with the stories about their disappearances.
Historian Dolly Jørgensen spent the past few years visiting these museums — more than 80 of them around the globe — for her new book, Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums (University of Chicago Press, $20).
It’s a haunting book, but it’s not really about grief. It’s an examination of how we tell stories of our recent losses — and how those stories can motivate action against ongoing environmental crises.
Jørgensen takes readers to distant museums — and maybe a few in their own neighborhoods — and brings their exhibits to life in words and dozens of full-color photos. She examines stories of violence and grief, but also uncovers how playful, engaging exhibits help to bring the dead to life.
The Revelator spoke with Jørgensen about her new book, what we can learn from extinction, the value of museums, and what still haunts her.
I’m glad to get a chance to talk to you, because this is just a marvelous and moving book. How would you describe this book to someone who’s just learning about it?
I would describe it as a walk through museum galleries with me. It’s a chance to encounter something that you can’t encounter. Recently extinct things, they’re not going to be in kids’ books, unlike dinosaurs. The only place you’re going to see a passenger pigeon or a Carolina parakeet is in a natural history museum.
I hope it’s me taking the reader by the hand and leading them to the galleries and standing in front of the cases and saying, “Here’s what you see” or ”Here’s what you don’t see.”
I’ve had the opportunity to compare a lot of different places — over 80 museums across the globe — so it’s also a way of thinking about broader patterns that you just wouldn’t notice otherwise.
I hope that once you read it, then when somebody visits their local place, wherever that is in Chicago or Shanghai, that you will think differently when you see the exhibition.
I think this book is for people who are interested in animals, people who are interested in nature, people who recognize that we’re losing things and want to think about what this means.
I think one of the messages that I hope comes out of the book is that we owe it to extinct species to not just forget about them, not just push them under the rug, but to engage with them as beings with stories that are worth telling, and worth holding onto that history. That’s what I want people to get out of it.
You have your own unique story, traveling around the world to see all these museums. You saw 28 thylacine remains. You saw Martha, the last passenger pigeon. You’ve probably encountered more extinct species than just about anyone on Earth. How does how does that make you feel?
Yeah, it’s true. I thought about that in end chapter of the book. I asked, what does it amount to, to look at all this death and destruction? But I think it matters.
Even though I’ve seen so many specimens, I remember them. I remember them all. If you say, “Oh, where was that one?” I’ll know: It was sitting in this case. It had this background and lighting.
In honoring their stories, I want to remember them.
Like seeing the last great auks. Their organs are in jars. That had a particular emotional response, because of seeing them disemboweled in that way, which of course is not the normal way that you encounter most things of natural history. We’re very sanitized, right? Things that look alive but aren’t alive. And these were very much dead. It’s their insides. That did stick with me, specifically on an emotional level.
But to honor or respect the fallen dead in this way, you can’t get hung up on being sorrowful about it, because then you can’t tell the story. You have to use it. You have to use engagement and emotion. I hope I faithfully tell these stories of my encounters and what another visitor might be able to encounter as well.
Is there an extinct species you’d hope to see that has eluded you so far?
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I had thought about trying to see the Falkland Islands wolf.
I think there’s a specimen in the Falkland Islands. I think there’s one in, like, New Zealand. And I was just like, well, this is not going to happen.
I got some funding from the National Research Council in Norway, and I had intended to do a lot of traveling in 2020 and 2021. I ended up not being able to do some of the big international things because of Covid.
I realize this is less about the intent of the book, but what do you think works about these exhibits, and what doesn’t?
Sometimes some of the exhibits don’t give enough of the relationship between animals and humans. They become very much about where it lived and how many babies it had at a time and how long it lived or what kind of nest it built or whatever.
I’m not saying that’s not important. It’s important to know what the species is and how it lived. But in essence, how it lived is also in relationship to humans, right? I mean, that’s the case why they’re not here anymore. I think sometimes that becomes very cursory and it’s not said enough.
There’s a couple of places where all the animals have a little geography label, showing you where they live in the world, which is a really nice thing when you just have a bunch of birds all together. People can say, “Oh, that bird lives in South America” or “That bird lives in Siberia.” And for the extinct species, all they did was put a big X on it. It bothered me because it means that nothing about where the species was prior to extinction is given to the visitors.
I also don’t think it works if people don’t call out things. Because while a person like myself knows to look for a particular thing in the cases, an average visitor won’t. For extinctions, I think you need, like, flashing lights, you know? You need a big font. You need to point out that this is gone, because people need to realize that this is something that they’re not going to see everywhere. This isn’t something they can just go to a zoo to see or look at a documentary film. It’s gone.
Good labeling calls out the extinct in a very clear way. And then tells the story of why this was lost.
Sometimes they just say something like, “Its habitat changed.” Let’s be more specific. If you want to say, “Commercial logging led to the downfall of the ivory-billed woodpecker,” that’s fine. But don’t just say like, “Oh, things changed.”
You tell these great stories about the species in the book, but ultimately, even though these are exhibits about extinct species, they’re about us. They’re about our violence. They’re about losing pieces of our culture. You say these exhibits enable grief. Can you talk about that?
I always think in terms of relations. It’s not just the animal. And in fact, I would say this about a lot of exhibits at natural history museums: There can be a lot more relational stories.
Back when I was doing reintroduction work, I had seen some exhibitions talking about the beaver in Scandinavia. And what I realized was that they didn’t talk about the fact that beavers had been extinct in all of Sweden and now were back because of reintroduction. They didn’t tell that story. And I was like, isn’t that a major part of its history of who the beaver is now?
It’s the same with these extinct species. I think that who they are, were, is about relations, right? And what happened to them and why. I think “why” is often completely left out. It’s those kinds of stories that I want people to recognize and that I’d like museums to tell.
There’s this kind of myth, and I’ve heard it from multiple people, that people don’t read labels. Well, let me tell you after going to 80 museums and walking through galleries and watching people … people read labels all the time. They’re always reading labels. And they read the labels and then they look at the thing and then they read the label again. They look at the thing. And so the stories they tell on those labels actually matter.
I’m not going to say they necessarily remember everything that they read. I don’t remember everything I read. But it matters in that moment. The label gives you the context. It tells you, “How do I interpret what I’m looking at?”
And that’s where I think it’s important to tell the kind of stories that help people to see that the things humans have done to the planet in the last 500 years was the reason all these things are disappearing. And we need to think, are we doing exactly the same thing now?
People need to have tangible stuff. One of the reasons that environmental messaging often fails is because it becomes too abstract. “It’ll save the world.” It’s like, what the hell does that mean? What am I supposed to do?
I think seeing the thing that’s lost can help. Because it’s something tangible. And that that can be like, “Oh, look at that bird. That was a really nice bird. But it’s not there now. Here’s why it’s not there.”
You write about that in the book. You say the value of displaying extinction is to engage with the ongoing environmental crisis. I kind of wish everyone would go to a natural history museum right now and see these exhibits and get their eyes opened.
Yeah. I mean, little steps, right?
One that I think is important to point out about museums: They’re really important culturally. We need to be investing in museums. And one of the main reasons we need to invest in them is that that’s where the kids go. Any museum I visit, there’s at least one school group there.
People don’t think about this, but it becomes kind of a standard thought in different age groups. You know, the fourth graders need to go see the dinosaurs or the first graders need to go see about biodiversity.
They have things they do in these museums. And it means that you’re hitting people when they’re at a very impressionable age, right? It’s going to change the way they think about the world.
The ghost story is intrinsic in the book. And ghost stories are so evocative in terms of fiction and our culture and our history, our legends, our tales. They remind us of the past. They remind us not to repeat the past. And I think employing some of those techniques, whether it’s from fiction or from our cultural narrative, is very effective.
Absolutely. There are different narrative styles, different kinds of stories you can tell, whether it’s a tragedy or a comedy. All kinds of things on all sides, whether it’s a farce or a very dramatic piece, there can be different registers that you speak on. And I think what I did want to say with this discussion of hauntings is that it does mean that these stories continue to be there, that they’re underlying, they’re being told. And that in fact, in many cases, being told with the bodies of those things.
And there are some cultures that do this, that keep the body of the deceased. And you tell stories of the deceased person in their presence of the body and the body does things. And it’s like that. They’re both physically present and present in narrative.
Those two things can work together, to remind us that they’re still there in essence.
This is one of the things that I’ve also wanted to get at: You think of extinction as the end, extinction as a finish. And it is a biological finish, but it’s not a finish of a story.
Yeah, the story echoes. Something is missing, it leaves a void. Other systems rush to fill it or can’t fill it.
Yes, exactly. And we have other mechanisms as humans. We do this with our storytelling, right? We’re still telling stories that Homer wrote down thousands of years ago. That’s a reason you can have allusions to The Iliad that people will understand, because they’ve heard it so much.
And I think you can do the same thing with extinct species. It’s not that it’s dead — it’s that it still has a story to tell. That story keeps them alive.
Speaking of ghosts, what haunts you?
I guess I’m just always wanting to see more. Even after the book was out, I’ve still gone to more museums. It’s not that I’m running around on purpose for it, but if I happen to be somewhere it’s like, “Oh, let me stop and see their local museum. What exhibitions are there?”
In a way, I guess I’m always haunted by all of them, because I’m always wanting to see more of their stories. They’re always on my mind. I just went to the Royal Ontario. I was doing some research for a completely different project, but I couldn’t resist going into the galleries with the extinct things.
So in a way, I guess I’m haunted by the idea of extinction, haunted by the idea of the encounter.
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This post was previously published on THEREVELATOR.ORG and is republished on Medium.
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